One year after working in Mercari

Ever since I sold myself to society in 2018, I embarked on the road for working with no turn-back.

I chose Mercari as the first company to start a full-time job. The flight to Tokyo was in late September 2019. And I joined Mercari on 2019.10.01 as a new grad.

Then I had to take part in a 2-month training. It's interesting, though didn't help much in terms of technology. After that, I had a skill test with other new grads and an interview to see if I could be assigned to the team according to my expectations. Fortunately, I was able to join my first wish team, the ML listing team.

Though Mercari is a pure Japanese company founded by the Japanese, it has a fairly good international culture compared to some famous American companies ( such as Google, Facebook, etc.). There are pretty many foreign engineers in the company, and English is one of our official languages. In my team, there are no Japanese engineers. My manager is from France and my tech leader is from America. So I only communicate with them in English, which is why my Japanese is still not good enough.

Before Covid-19, we had a fixed core time work style. On every workday, employees must be in the office between 12 pm to 4 pm. And we could decide when to start work and when to end work, as long as we could ensure to work for 8 hours each workday. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Mercari asked us to work from home since this February, and I have been working from my small home in Tokyo for nearly 1 year. Later, Mercari revised the work style rules. We have shifted from a fixed core time work style to a more flexible free work style. As long as we can ensure 8 hours of work each workday, we can do our work at any time. Of course, we also need to make sure that meetings are held as usual.

During the past 1 year, I have been more of a data analyst than a model magician. Here in Mercari, we have many tasks to complete, but in the meantime, due to the lack of useful training data, many of these tasks cannot be performed now. One of my responsibilities here is to think about how to improve the situation and make real ML/DL practices possible. And I believe that as I spend more time on my career in Mercari, I can gradually come up with real ML solutions for our business.